write.as/jonbeckett

It’s Sunday evening, dinner is busy cooking, the clothes are mostly washed, two of the children are watching TV in their rooms after a day on the rugby fields, and the eldest is at a friend’s house after lying to my face this morning. Not happy with her at all, but trying not to react too badly. Let’s just say her choice of friends is very, very poor, but that there’s very little we can do about it. We will inevitably find outselves picking the pieces up in a few weeks once again.

As mentioned, we spent much of the day at a distant rugby club, watching our younger daughters play. Miss 12 complained of feeling ill all morning, was arm-twisted into playing, and then lasted all of ten minutes before putting on every piece of clothing we took with us, and retreating to the club house.

Miss 14’s team had a barnstormer of a game – perhaps the best I have ever seen them play. If not for some very questionable refereeing decisions the final score could have been absolutely enormous. As it was she left the field grinning, laughing, and wouldn’t shut up all the way home as we tried to listen to the England Italy rugby match on the radio.

This evening I’m contemplating making a trip to the shop later to buy supplies after dinner – supplies for a late night Superbowl TV marathon. It won’t even start here until something like 1am, and I have to be at work in the morning. It will be a good distraction though, given that I’m kind of dreading work this week. I’m thinking a giant bag of peanut M&Ms, a giant bag of crisps, and a bottle of wine should set me up perfectly.

I don’t think our children have ever watched American Football – and it might take quite some explaining to them.

“That’s right – they wear crash helmets, and run into each other on purpose, even though they could pass it like in Rugby. They can also substitute the entire team as often as they like.”

“So why don’t they pass like Rugby instead of running straight into each other like idiots?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

After the relentless questioning from Miss 12 grew almost continuous, I caved and made lunch for everybody – well, everybody except my other half who has gone out for the day.

“What shall we have then?”

Shrug.

I had a look through the cupboard, and discovered several tins of beans – one of them with sausages in.

“How about beans on toast with cheese on top? – with sausages in the beans – look!” (I showed her the tin).

She didn’t just nod – her eyes opened wide as she nodded. This is the Miss 12 equivalent of “Hell yes!”. One problem – no bread. Five minutes later I had pulled a coat on, and wandered off into the rain that has been falling all morning.

We have a wonderful corner shop. Although we call it a “corner shop”, it isn’t on a corner – it’s in the middle of a busy suburban road, flanked on all sides by houses, and usually decorated by several teenagers standing outside. I imagine the teenagers are either trying to scrape enough money together to buy something, or drawing straws on who will attempt to buy alcohol.

After arriving back at home – still minus one daughter who was still at a football match – I discovered Miss 12 putting saucepans on the hob. “Are you hungry by any chance?”

She grinned.

Half an hour later – after answering the door to a bedraggled girls team goalie covered in mud and ushering her towards the bath – I put the beans on, and threw some bread in the toaster.

Those few minutes – sitting around the dinner table eating lunch together – were magic. Nobody said a word – they just ate. Everything. I know some people look down their nose at things like beans on toast, but on a cold wet day I challenge anybody to find something better.

This week has been something like a firework – starting off burning fiercely, then finally letting go with an explosion, leaving a debris field full of smoking wreckage behind. Sorry if I’m being vague – you should know by now that I never really open up about anything outside of my own little bubble.

Thank the maker it’s Friday though. I’ve already drunk half a bottle of wine, and it’s gone straight to my head. No taking advantage, okay? I wish I still had the tub of chocolate ice-cream I downed the other night.

I’m sitting in the junk room writing this – sitting at the decade old PC running Linux Mint. It always makes me laugh that when people find out what I do for a living, they imagine I will have some sort of rocket-ship laptop, and a home computer with multiple screens, ridiculous processing power, and enough storage to backup the known universe. The reality is something of a polar opposite.

I have three daughters. I struggle to afford cheap tubs of frozen yoghurt, let alone rocket-ship laptops. I’m also having considerable trouble typing this – the wine really HAS gone to my head. Like I said – no hitting on me – my defensive walls and typing skills appear to be in pieces around my feet this evening.

In other news, I notice the Superbowl is on the TV here late on Sunday night. No doubt all the sporty-mc-sporto American people will know all about it. I’ve tried to stay up and watch it the last few years – no doubt I’ll try again, powered by peanut M&Ms, and coffee.

Here’s to making it to the end of the week relatively unscathed. I’m not sure that’s something really worth celebrating, but I’ll take it.

How is it the beginning of February already? Where did January go? If I were to believe the various posts I have seen while dipping my toes into the acid laden waters of Facebook, most people seem to think January has been hanging around forever. Not for me. The few days off over Christmas and New Year seem like yesterday.

I’m pretty sure each year of your life accelerates. I wonder if we build up a sort of momentum, and then coast through our later years until we roll to a stop?

This month’s anticipated work trip to Germany has been pushed back into March. I’m not sure how the rest of the project will unfold now – it all looked neat and tidy when I drew up plans at the start of the year.

I guess the big news today was the arrival of a sandwich van at the office. I doubt I’ll buy anything, for the same reason I don’t typically buy coffee in town – I can’t afford it. I always wonder when I see others regularly buying coffee en-route to work – how on earth do they afford it? We buy either instant coffee, or pods for a Tassimo machine at home – and instant coffee is provided for free at work. Buying one cup of coffee for the same price as a large jar of instant coffee has always seemed a bit mad to me.

Let’s try to forget that I take Miss 17 for coffee at least once a week though. If it costs me the price of a couple of cups of coffee and a chocolate brownie for her to unload her troubles, I’ll pay it every time.

Anyway. Tomorrow is Friday. Nearly the weekend.

Do you ever get to the weekend, and feel like you’re collapsing over the finish line – only it’s a finish line where there is washing up piled everywhere, dirty clothes in huge heaps, and a running track that’s falling apart all over the place ?

After completing the epic Tuesday night slog yesterday evening (meet Miss 17, go for coffee, buy groceries, pick up Miss 13, change her into football kit, drop her a football, walk Miss 17 home, clear up kitchen, pick up Miss 13 from football, go home, make dinner, eat, wash up, etc, etc, etc), I started sorting out the files on my other half’s laptop.

There’s a story here. My other half is good at stress testing laptops. She’s had something like four in a row over the last ten years, and has destroyed them all – not through misuse – just by using them to destruction. Along the way I have taken her data each time, and dumped it onto the next laptop in an “Old Laptop” folder – containing documents, photos, and so on.

So we get to last night. The current laptop – bought second hand from where I work – is on it’s last legs. The touch-pad buttons no longer work properly, and the battery is shot to pieces – if you pull the cable the laptop lasts perhaps a minute before hibernating itself.

“We need to get everything uploaded to Google Drive – then I’ll buy you a Chromebook for your birthday”.

“Ok”.

Why do I say these things without really thinking about the true scale of the problem ? It turns out she had somewhere in the region of fifteen gigabytes of documents, and fifteen gigabytes of photos stored throughout the old laptop folders. I rationalised it all down into a half-way sensible folder structure (which took hours), and then kicked off the Google client software to start uploading. By then it was 2am.

At 7am this morning, after getting out of the shower I had a look to see how the laptop was doing. It was still going. While tinkering, I also did something I’ve been promising for ages. We have a network disk drive at home – it has all of the old childrens photos and videos on it. She wanted that uploaded into Google Drive too – except the client software wouldn’t use a mapped drive. I set it going copying the files just before I left for work.

Nearly nine hours later, I got home from work, and had a look at the laptop to see how it was doing – about 75% of the way through copying from the network drive to the laptop – it had also started uploading THOSE files. Sixty gigabytes worth of them.

If you stopped reading this some time ago, I don’t blame you – but this soporific adventure explains my absence from the internet over the last 24 hours.

In other news, work was a bit of a nightmare. I can’t write about that though. I suppose I can write about getting through five or six cups of coffee during the day. It had no effect. I really do suspect I have become immune to caffeine.

One more thing. I have had a stiff neck all day (all say “ahhh”) – because my other half was cold in bed last night, and engineered a cuddle out of me to keep herself warm. Here’s the thing nobody ever tells you about spooning – there is nowhere for the guy’s arm to go. I always end up with it folded up above me on the pillow, and my head resting on it. I imagine once asleep I probably ended up twisted all over the place – hence the nightmarish stiff neck I woke up with this morning.

Anyway. Enough. This was a blog post about nothing at all. I promise to find something more interesting next time.

You know the whole “slash and burn” drive I’ve been on just recently? I have expanded it this morning to include the backup of my blog, and all of my work notes and research. I’m not sure if I’m going to call this “simplification”, “putting my eggs in one basket”, or just plain “stupidity”.

The backup of the blog posts – over four thousand of them – was at GitHub. They are all being uploaded to Google Drive while writing this. The work notes and research were in Evernote – I imported them into Google Drive this morning. Putting everything in one place seems to make sense, given my propensity to tinker with things. It also prepares me for the day when my old desktop computer at home finally packs up, and I revert entirely to the Chromebook.

Now I can get on with emptying my head into the blog each day, instead of getting on with whatever I should be doing. Oh – and of course I’ll carry on filling the bullet journal with all the things I’m pretending to do to make myself look busy.

Today started kicking my butt as soon as I arrived in the office this morning. It then kept kicking my butt throughout the day. I’m still standing though, which either says something about the strength of my butt, my pain threshold, or my general level of stupidity. I’m not entirely sure which.

The day is over now though. I can finally relax into the evening without keeping half an eye on the next fireball to come rolling towards the portcullis. I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room, listening to a Sibelius play-list on Spotify, and resisting the temptation to read Trump’s predictable hissy-fit about being made fun of at the Grammys last night.

I’m not a very political person, but I do enjoy a good bun-fight – as long as I’m not involved. I don’t think anybody from Great Britain can point the finger at anybody at the moment anyway – seeing as our own government couldn’t govern it’s way out of a paper bag without half of it resigning, and the rest kicking each other’s feet out from under themselves.

I just try to get on with my own life – make it from one day to the next, and not do too much harm along the way. I no longer have a “professional” homepage on the internet, I’ve almost left Twitter, I rarely set foot in Facebook, I’ve shut my Instagram account for the moment, and emptied Tumblr. Since Christmas you might say I have been on a social internet tour of destruction.

Whatever you do, don’t give me a box of matches – I don’t know what I might burn down next.

(I’m joking, before you react angrily)

Sometimes I spend an hour randomly following links from blogs to comments, and on to further blogs – reading, commenting, and reminding myself what it is to take part in the wider community.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I really enjoy it. Submerging yourself into the blogosphere (horrible word, but I can’t think of anything better) can be a very personal experience. Of course it depends on the writing you happen upon, but invariably you find all manner of strangers sharing their thoughts, experiences, struggles, hopes, and dreams with you. They have no clue who you are, but in many ways that is the attractionthe unknown reader.

In the same way that some people visit a therapist, or a psychiatrist, perhaps those of us that share our thoughts online are doing something similar.

While reading, it often strikes me how a well written blog post creates a sense of you being taken into the confidence of the author. Even though you know deep down you are one of countless thousands that might wander past, sometimes a voice will call out and capture you. Before you know it you are exchanging comments, then emails, and an unlikely friendship is forged.

I suppose it could be argued that those of us publishing our thoughts are fishermen of a sortthrowing messages in bottles over the side of our boat each day, wondering if anybody might find them and read them.

It’s heading towards lunchtime on Sunday. There are some bagels with my name on them on the kitchen counter, waiting for me to fill them with cheese and whatever else I can find in the fridge. I’m home alone with Miss 17, who refused to get up this morning – she asked yesterday if I might take her shopping in a nearby town, but by this morning the enormity of actually getting out of bed defeated her. I on the other half was up by 8am, showered, shaved, dressed, and doing chores.

I just ordered new work clothes from the internet. I would have bought them in town today, and was annoyed that the shopping trip wasn’t happening – until it dawned on me that you can order things on the internet and have them delivered. I know. I know. I work with technology – but I really am that stupid sometimes. Five minutes after signing up for a store login with a huge department store that can deliver for free, I had ordered three shirts, seven pairs of socks, a pair of shoes, and a new tie. I had to stop looking around in the end, because I would have kept clicking the “buy” button on things.

“Oh yes, I need a travel chess set. Oh – and one of those tie clips. That travel wash kit looks good too. Oh, and an MP3 player shaped like a dog”.

I’m wondering what I’m going to fill the rest of Sunday with. The chores are mainly done, and my other half won’t arrive home with the younger children until late afternoon. Miss 17 is holed up in her room playing some kind of Manga inspired game, and the cats really don’t care if any of us have been run over by a truck.

I asked my other half if she wanted me to cook tonight, but she said she will pick something up on the way home – so I don’t even have the evening meal to worry about. I cooked spaghetti bolognese for everybody last night – which you might normally think of as an easy meal, except two of us are vegetarian, and one is gluten free, so you have to make everything twice. Nothing is ever simple.

Maybe I’ll talk Miss 17 into a walk into town, to pretend we’re part of cafe society for an hour. We can prop up a table in Starbucks and watch the world go by.

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

So begins the text adventure game “Zork”, written by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling between 1977 and 1979. Although not the first computer game (Spacewar almost certainly claims that prize), Zork marks the emergence of text adventures games from University projects, to the mass market. You can trace the likes of Skyrim and Uncharted directly back to them.

I can still remember the first text adventure game I played. It was a version of “The Hobbit” on the MSX in about 1984. The game presented a scene drawn in front of you, along with a description, and the invitation to issue commands via the keyboard. Typing commands such as “open door”, “go east”, and so on would describe changes to the world around you via the printed word, and your imagination would do the rest.

If Steven Spielberg has retained the roots of the novel, Zork is about to become a LOT better known, because it features in “Ready Player One”. The game was referenced in a riddle half-way through the novel – “The captain conceals the Jade Key, in a dwelling long neglected. But you can only blow the whistle, once the trophies are all collected”. I won’t ruin any more than this, because Zork is really there as a background for the rest of the riddle. I will give you a clue though – if you know what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak nearly got arrested for before starting Apple, you’ll be on the right track.

Seriously though – go and read Ready Player One before the movie comes out. Just do it. It’s by far the most entertaining book I have read in the last few years, and remains one of the few books I have read more than once.

I can still remember playing the Infocom text adventure “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. I got it for my birthday one year, and remember nerding out over the contents of the box. You received a set of protective glasses (made of black cardboard), a microscopic space fleet (labelled, in a ziplock bag), pocket fluff, and of course a 3.5” floppy disk containing the game. Oh, the hours I spent arguing with Mr Prosser – trying to talk him out of letting my house be bulldozed before heading to the pub with Ford Prefect, and drinking rather heavily in anticipation of the end of the world.

I also remember receiving a hooky copy of “Leather Goddesses of Phobos”, which promised all sorts of debauchery judging by the advertising artwork, and caused me to spend rather too long running around in circles in the hope of reading something vaguely erotic. Of course the game contained nothing of the sort, but that didn’t stop my teenage mind from obsessing over it just a little bit too much. I guess this was a few years before the internet, and before we all started watching photos of our favourite movie actors or music artists scroll slowly down the screen as the modem did it’s best to keep up.

Who remembers the sequence of sounds their modem used to make when connecting to the internet? Or the sound of the mail client announcing new messages ?

If you do ever find yourself playing zork, try throwing the dagger at the thing in the dark. You’ll realise what I’m talking about should you ever find yourself in that situation. Trust me.